Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [92]
“I know. I’m sorry. It was wrong of me.” She no longer sounded drunk or flirtatious or desperate or upset in any way. She was perfectly ordinary, polite but removed.
“I didn’t even tell her the other stuff you told me.” He saw that a student was standing outside the booth, waiting for him to finish. Paul lowered his voice. He felt mildly hysterical. “Remember all that stuff?”
“Look, please, I said I’m sorry. Can you hold on a second?” Paul heard a doorbell ring. After a minute, she came back to the phone. “I have to go now. I’ll call you back.”
“When?” Paul demanded, afraid that she was lying to him, that it was a ploy to be rid of him. In January, when Paul had wanted to get off the phone with Deirdre, she had pleaded with him to stay on the line.
“Later. Tonight,” she said.
“I want to know when.”
She told him she’d call at ten.
The idea came to him immediately after getting off the phone, the receiver still in his hand. He left the library, went to the nearest RadioShack. “I need a phone,” he told the salesman. “And an adapter with two jacks.”
It was a night Sang worked at the bookstore; as usual, she was home by nine. She said nothing to Paul when she came into the kitchen to get her mail.
“I called Deirdre,” Paul said.
“Why don’t you stop involving yourself this way?” Sang said evenly, leafing through a catalogue.
“She’s calling me at ten o’clock,” Paul said. “If you want, you can listen in without her knowing. I got another phone and hooked it up to our line.”
She dropped the catalogue, noticing the second phone. “Jesus, Paul,” she hissed. “I can’t fucking believe you.”
She went into her room; at five to ten she came out and sat next to Paul. He’d set the phones together on the table. At exactly one minute past ten, both phones rang. Paul picked up one. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Deirdre said.
He nodded, motioning to Sang, and slowly, carefully, Sang picked up the other phone and put it to her ear without allowing it to touch her. She held it unnaturally, the bottom of the receiver turned away from her mouth, pointed toward her shoulder.
“Like I said, Paul, I’m sorry for calling you. I shouldn’t have,” Deirdre said.
She seemed relaxed, willing to talk, in no apparent rush. Paul relaxed a little, too. “But you did.”
“Yes.”
“And you cried about Farouk.”
“Yes.”
“And then you made me into a liar.”
She was silent.
“You denied the whole thing.”
“It was Freddy’s idea.”
“And you went along with it,” Paul said. He was looking at Sang. She was pressing her top teeth into her lower lip in a way that looked painful.
“What was I supposed to do, Paul?” Deirdre said. “He was furious when he found out I’d called you. He refused to see me. He unplugged his phone. He wouldn’t answer the door.”
Sang put a palm against the table’s edge, as if to push it away, but she ended up pushing herself back in her chair, scraping the linoleum. Paul put a finger to his lips, but then he realized that, to Deirdre, it was he who’d made the sound. She kept talking.
“Listen, Paul, I’m sorry you’re in the middle of all this. I really am sorry I called. It was just that Freddy kept telling me Sang was his cousin, and when I asked him to introduce me to her he refused. I didn’t care at first. I figured I wasn’t the only woman in his life. But then I fell in love with him.” She wanted to believe him, she explained. She was a thirty-five-year-old woman, already married and divorced. She didn’t have time for this.
“But I’ve ended it,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You know, there was a point when I actually believed he couldn’t live without me. That’s what he does to women. He depends on them. He asks them to do a hundred things, makes them believe his life won’t function without them. That was him this afternoon when you called, still wanting to see me, still wanting to keep me on the side. He doesn’t have any friends, you see. Only lovers. I think he needs them, the way other people need a family or friends.” She sounded reasonable and reflective now, as if she were describing